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Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

1899–1973 Ireland

Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen (June 7 1899 – February 22 1973) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer.

Ireland
Authors
Novelists
Short story writers

Also known as: Bowen, Elizabeth

Random Elizabeth Bowen quote

15 quotes

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends.

The Death of the Heart (1939)

It is thought that women inspire by their beauty; more often they do so by their longings.

A Time in Rome (1960)

Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem.

The Death of the Heart (1939)

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself — in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

The Death of the Heart (1939)

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

The House in Paris (1935)

Cicero, in invoking the law of heaven, invoked what was by nature of heaven: law — inviolable principle, better than the vacillating gods.

A Time in Rome (1960)

I am sick of the governessy attitude of our age, which is coming to be more genuinely presumptuous, nosier and more busybody than the Victorian.

A Time in Rome (1960)

Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. In its carelessness it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

Untruths are thieves, robbing us of our birthright.

Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.

The Death of the Heart (1939)

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

The House in Paris (1935)

[T]here is a flaw in civilization from the instant it has to admit fear.

A Time in Rome (1960)

[U]ntruths are thieves, robbing us of a birthright.

A Time in Rome (1960)

And yet in a way I would rather fail point blank. Things one can do have no value. I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world is.

The House in Paris (1935)

"What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually— our sense of personality is a sense of outrage and we'll never get outside of it." But the hold of the country was that, she considered, it could be thought of in terms of oneself, so interpreted.

The Last September (1929)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Elizabeth Bowen (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.